“A federal judge took Apple to task on Friday for showing no contrition about potentially defrauding its customers of hundreds of millions of dollars,” Joab Jackson reports for IDG News Service. “‘None of the publishers nor Apple have expressed any remorse’ about colluding to fix electronic book prices in 2010, said District Judge Denise Cote, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District Court of New York. ‘They are, in a word, unrepentant.’ Additionally, Cote expressed dissatisfaction that Apple had not taken any steps to modify its business practices, such as establishing internal compliance monitoring, to prevent it from undertaking similar behavior in the future.”

Jackson reports, “Despite Apple’s apparent hubris, Cote said she wanted to make the remediation as narrow as possible to minimize unnecessary government intervention in the e-book market. The injunction should only try to restore competitive pricing in the electronic book market, to prevent Apple from colluding with publishers in the future, and to award appropriate — though not overly punitive — damages to e-book consumers, Cote said. She stated she would rather not establish an external monitor to watch Apple, expressing hope that the injunction be structured in a way that an external watchdog would not be needed. Nor did she wish to force Apple to change its policies on how it runs its app store.”

“In response, Apple chiefly argued that, because it plans to appeal the court’s decision, the court should stay all further actions. Apple argued that it has compelling reasons for believing that an appeal would be successful for the company. Cote declined to place a stay on proceedings, however, expressing doubt that Apple had that strong of a case.”

I say it based on years of studying case law and judicial decisions. She’s either an idiot or a crook. Those are the only choices. She ignored the evidence, and somehow constructed a scenario where the defendant is guilty in spite of lowering average prices and not being in control of a significant portion of the market. She ignored Amazon’s predatory pricing and virtual monopoly in the ebook market. She’s either totally clueless or on the take.

Ballmer and Gates did not force all PCs to ship with only Windows. Check your facts.

Ballmer and Gates had in Microsoft’s contract with its hardware assembly partners that they had to pay Microsoft royalties for every PC they sold, whether it had Windows installed or not. That is not the same thing as you stated.

They seem to be behaving almost as if they believe they didn’t do anything wrong…. oh, maybe THAT is why they are appealing the decision. Seriously, where does this kind of thought process come from? It is not a judicial premise, but smacks more of political grandstanding.

So in the bizarro world of DOJ, it’s in consumers’ best interests to have Amazon alone set the prices instead of multiple vendors and the content creators themselves.

That’ll be just great until Amazon can no longer support its razor thin margins (and Wall Street wakes up to that) and the publishers go under because they can’t charge premium prices for their most interesting products without being sued by their own government.

Transcript of secret message from Obama to Judge Cote, as intercepted by the NSA:

“Judge Cote, I have good news and bad news for you. First, the good news. Under my administration, America is turning communist, which is in line with my communist manifesto upon being elected.

And now for the bad news. Due to government sequestrations, we are unable to pay the full measure of your salary. Please make every effort to shakedown any company with cash reserves that comes before your court.”